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We chose a Dell Dimension 4100 as the foundation for our backup server. It's over five years old, but its 1-GHz Pentium III was actually more than we needed. The 384MB of installed memory gives XP some elbow room, and for most tasks, we'll take memory over clock speed. Remember, you can't buy a machine this slow, even if you wanted to. It's obsolete, but just right for our project. This one was kicking around in our labs, but if you actually have to buy one, you shouldn't spend more than $100 or so.

The 4100 had a fresh copy of XP SP2 on the 40GB hard disk, but we wanted to have it back up four machines, with a total of around 30GB of active storage. This problem was solved with an 80GB Western Digital WD800. We popped it in, formatted it, and gave it a drive letter. We wanted a dedicated drive for backups, even though most of the C: drive would be unused. We bought a second WD800 for more storage or possible mirroring but decided to start with one drive while we tested various software solutions. The Dell 4100's motherboard doesn't support mirrored drives, but we figured we'd find some too-clever way to do it. The Dell already had a network card, so at least for our single-drive version, we were all done, other than making some nice mounting rails for the drive.

When you configure your own machine, make sure it has at least 256MB of memory and several times more disk storage than the total amount you want to back up. Remember that you probably need to back up only data; in case of disaster, applications generally need to be reinstalled from their CDs.

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